Two stray girls at Wardlow
by whopooh
Summary: Phryne has just brought home a young girl, Jane, and Dot decides to take her under her arms. This is set within S1E2, after the household has been disturbed at night by the terrifying Miss Gay who claims to be Jane's aunt. And the big question is - could I make Jack Robinson knit?


_This is just a short one, but since several of you joked in your reviews of my last fic (The Worrying Kind) about Jack perhaps being a knitter, I just felt I needed to post this one too! This fic was written because I wanted the answer to the question "How can I make Jack Robinson knit?" Whether I managed or not, you'll have to decide for yourselves :)_

 _Thank you so much for your comments on the last fic!_

* * *

Dorothy Williams found herself alone with the stray young girl Miss Phryne had brought home from their unexpectedly aborted journey to Ballarat. It had been quite an adventure – being stopped in the middle of the night, the smell of chloroform, Miss Phryne searching in the dark with the police, poor Miss Henderson whose mother had been murdered, and the wayward Jane who had been found with the murdered woman's jewels on her. Luckily, Miss Phryne and Dot had been there, and Miss Phryne had decided to take them all home because she had a heart as big as her house. And, most likely, her curiosity. The police hadn't been able to do a thing about it.

Now it was very late in the evening. The household had been disturbed by a furious Miss Gay who wanted to claim Jane but Phryne had not allowed it, making Mr Butler all but throw the woman out of her house. After the fray, she had entrusted Jane to Dot, who wasn't sure how to calm her enough to make her sleep again that night. After one appraising look at the girl in nightdress, she took her to the kitchen and made her cocoa. Jane had still not spoken a word of what she knew or what she had seen, and Dot knew that concerned Phryne. The girl looked forlorn and a little uncomfortable in the big, plush, beautifully furnished house, and Dot felt sorry for her.

"Jane, why don't you take your cocoa with you, and we can go up to my room?"

Dot's room was at the top of the house. It was not too big, not at all intimidating, nor was it too small, and much more moderately furnished than Phryne's rooms – and it was gloriously, unfathomably her own. It had been for all of ten hours or so. She had started to cry when she realized it would all be hers. Her own room, to do what she pleased in. It was decidedly the most perfect room she had seen in her life.

Jane admired the room with its bed – rumpled, since Dot had already retired to bed earlier that evening, and with a colourful bedspread folded in the lower end – a comfortable chair, a large chest of drawers in a beautiful wood Jane didn't know the name of, and a similarly wooden desk placed under a window facing west. On the wall hung a mirror, and a few paintings that Dot hadn't chosen herself, and that she might exchange at some time in the future.

"I haven't really gotten used to it yet," Dot said. "This is the first time in my life I have my own room."

Jane looked at her, surprised. She hadn't thought much about it, but had assumed that Dot was _the other kind_ of person, the sort that – contrary to Jane herself – had always had their lives neatly ordered. She seemed such a well off person, being a companion to such a wonderful lady, and living in a big house like Wardlow.

Dot could almost see the cogs turn in Jane's mind. The girl already looked a little bit more comfortable, as she skittered to Dot's window – _Dot's window! She actually had her own window!_ – to look out into the dark night.

"You take the bed," Dot said. "I prefer the chair when I'm knitting." And with that, she sat down and grabbed a quite big knitted... something; Jane wasn't sure exactly what it was, though it had the same beige colour as the rest of Dot. Absent-mindedly Dot caressed the yarn in a loving way that brought a smile to Jane's face.

Dot liked the way knitting made talking seem slightly random, at ease and of no specific consequence. Jane sat down on the bed and wondered when she had last been in such a domestic setting.

After a quarter of an hour, Jane was reclining in the comfortable bed, cocoa still in hand, watching Miss Williams knitting, and realized she felt safe. Miss Phryne had made her feel protected today, like she was an eagle who had spread her wings over Jane, however temporary it might turn out to be. Miss Williams was not an eagle; perhaps she was a hen – a warm presence, sitting there radiating kindness. Jane wondered if an eagle and a hen working together might be everything a girl would ever need. Dot was, Jane thought, like the steady unskittish mother or older sister she had never had. She did have Ruth, but Ruth was more like a rambuctuous twin sister to run in the streets with. They didn't offer steadying presences for each other, although they did offer almost everything else.

Dot was the one to break the silence.

"Are you afraid of the adults you meet, do they feel threatening to you?" she asked.

Jane wondered whether to put up her tough side or allow her softer self to show through. Perhaps the good bath she had been subjected to by Dot and Mr Butler had washed away some of her streetsmart toughness, since she confessed:

"Sometimes I am. But I try not to think of it."

"Do you have a special trick? A way not to feel scared and not to think about it?" Dot asked, for a short moment ceasing to knit to look up at Jane. "I was always afraid of everyone when I was a child, and my sister used to tell me to imagine they were all nude to make them less terrifying and more silly."

Jane giggled at the thought and sipped the luke warm cocoa dregs.

"But it didn't work," Dot continued. "I thought they were even more terrifying when I saw them as angry _and_ naked in my imagination."

Jane nodded. She didn't particularly want to envision the mean hypnotist Mr Merten or the harsh Miss Gay without their grubby clothes on, she had to admit.

"So I thought out my own version. I decided to think of them while they were trying to knit instead."

"Knit?" Jane said, surprised and a little incredulous.

"Knit," Dot confirmed. "My employer, Mrs Andrews, who later turned out to be a murderer and a drug seller" – Jane's look took on real incredulity here; the people she met here certainly were surprising – "I used to think of her as doing minute embroidery of small dancing pugs, but never remembering to do only four legs for every dog. And you know Inspector Robinson? He was the one who was in charge when they found you" – Jane nodded, yes, the greyish, stern-looking one, who so very quickly had handed her over to Miss Phryne – "Before I came here, he arrested me."

"Arrested you?"

"For murder."

"Murder!"

"I know," Dot said. "Imagine that. I had just met Miss Phryne and then I was arrested. He was very grave and very correct, and he frightened me deeply. So I decided to imagine him knitting a sweater with a very complicated pattern, a kind of cable stitch, and that this was the reason why he never smiled – it was because he didn't manage the pattern, however much he tried to count the rows, again and again. I made it with purple yarn, he had bought far too much yarn that was laying about everywhere around him, and I decided he was knitting it for Miss Phryne as a surprise present. He was not good at all, and he realized it would be a lousy gift – he got the pattern all wrong, and the sleeves far too long, as if it was knitted for an orangutan."

Jane had to laugh out loud about the ridiculous scene, and about how detailed Dot hade made it in her head. Dot laughed too, pleased that she had made the young strange girl relax.

Jane furrowed her brow. "I don't know enough about knitting to make such scenes out of it, though. I'll have to think about something else… I will think about them working for Mr Merton!" she exclaimed, trying it out aloud. "Pickpocketing people." Jane looked up, realizing she had told Dot more than she had ever meant to reveal, but Dot didn't seem to be about to scowl or pry, so she continued.

"That police constable... I bet he would be a lousy pickpocket. He would immediately be caught out, and look so guilty, and would have to make a run for it. Though he would probably get away most of the time."

"You are right, Constable Collins looks so completely... innocent somehow," Dot said, pausing her knitting again to think about their meeting in the train corridor. "Though he really is dashing, isn't he?" Her eyes took on a dreamy look. "He is so kind, and his smile really lits up his face, and his eyes... But I never thought about him knitting. I didn't have to, because he never scared me."

"The grey inspector, though," Jane continued, slightly animated, enjoying the game. "He would pick pockets quite well, and he would get away with it because he would look like he was not at all stealing, just walking around thinking about something really important. But then he would put the things in his own pockets, and start thinking about all those other important things, and his pockets would be picked by someone else. The look on his face when he gets home and has empty pockets! That scowl would be so deep he might get stuck with it!"

They laughed together and Dot's needles started moving again, emitting a small, steady sound that was incredibly reassuring.

"You know, I think maybe I could speak to Miss Phryne, and maybe the Inspector too, in the morning. He can't be so frightening when he can't keep his own pockets under control – and when he knits far too long purple sleeves!"

"I'm glad," Dot said, "and I know Miss Phryne will be delighted."

"I could never think of _her_ failing as a pickpocket, though," Jane said, considering. "I think she would be terrific."

"I think you're right. And I never thought about her as a knitter either. She and her kindness and her card – she gave that to me when I was all alone and desperate when I was arrested, do you see it there on my desk? – it was like a small ray of hope for me. I never needed to make myself not to be scared of her."

Dot was quiet for a while.

"But you know, Jane, I think she would be a magnificently bad knitter."


End file.
